Elon, Inc.Elon Musk has been making news at a furious pace as he seeks to dismantle wide swaths of the federal government at Donald Trump’s behest. His behavior has certainly been enough to fill the pages of Judd Legum’s new publication, Musk Watch. The newsletter, an offshoot of Legum’s Popular Information Substack, launched on Inauguration Day. Since then, he’s used his background in law, journalism and digging through public records to keep track of the South Africa native and what he and his “Department of Government Efficiency” have been doing.
How does one keep track of someone like Musk? In this special episode of Elon, Inc., Bloomberg technology editor Sarah Frier sits down with Legum to talk about his work, the potential legal consequences for Musk and his minions and an alternate universe where Musk behaves in a less controversial fashion.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Let me tell you we have a new star.
A star is born Elon.
Up On, Mars, Juth and Kennemy.
He is the Thomas Edison plus plus plus.
Of our age.
Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity.
I feel for the guy. I would say ninety eight percent really appreciate what he deesk.
But those two percent that are nasty, they I'll pay in four post. We were meant for great things in the United States of America, and Elon reminds us of that we don't have a fourth branch of governments called Elon.
Musk Hi everyone Sarah Fryar here. The day of Donald Trump's inauguration, jud legoom launched a publication called musk Watch, an offshoot of a successful newsletter, Popular Information. This caught my eye because we had Elon Inc. Made similar bet that the most powerful person in the world was getting more powerful and deserved deeper discussion long term. I wanted to invite Judd to talk about why he made a decision and what he has learned so far. Jud has had a clear perspective in his work critical of Mustage, but he backs up those opinions with exclusive data and scoops that make his newsletter worthy of reading no matter what you think about Musk. So, without further ado, here's the interview with jud for the record in these fast moving times.
It was reported last.
Friday, jud Legoom, thank you so much for being here with us today.
Well, thanks for having me.
The thing that strikes me as a challenge for something like musk Watch, which you launched, I think in right around inauguration correct.
Yeah, the inauguration day is why not launch.
An inauguration day this was this is an opportunity to have this macro view of the richest man in the world slashing US buyd. We initially thought it might be like an advisory committee to the President, but then it turned into something that was just so embedded with every US agency and you've been getting a lot of very detailed inside scoops. But then you also have the big picture. How can you possibly keep track of everything happening at all of these different agencies and come to a conclusion of the through line here, like what's actually happening?
How do we keep track?
It's difficult.
I think it's difficult because we've never had one person with this combination of extreme wealth and political power married together. I did some reading of some other folks who you might throw into that conversation, like a John D. Rockefeller, who was very wealthy, maybe almost as wealthy as Musks now if you adjusted all for inflation, and he had political influence, but he wasn't embedded in the way. He didn't have an office in the White House, he wasn't going through individual department's figuring it out what he wanted to keep and what he didn't. It's really unprecedented, and I think, how do you keep up with it? I don't think you can. It's a matter of figuring out what are the key important parts, what are the things that are most consequential. And that's really been our task with Musk Watch as well.
We're not gonna be able to.
Get to everything, but we're trying to isolate the things that really are having the biggest impact.
It feels like that's part of the strategy, is to do so much at once that it becomes difficult for folks to do much more than say, you know, I want to figure out what's even happening before I know how to react to it. How do you think this is feeling from a strategy perspective for a Musk, why is he going about it this way?
Well, you can see part of it if you look at how the lawsuits progress. Obviously there's a number of lawsuits, dozens of laws suits that have been filed, many of which involve, if not Musk personally, than DOGE, and often they are acting more rapidly than the legal system can keep up with. So, for instance, there's challenges based on the fact that the DOGE operatives were not part of various departments and so therefore their actions within this departments were illegal.
Then there's been a.
Reason filing says, oh, actually, now they're all part of the departments. We've signed them up and they're all a bit assigned and are now officially a part of it.
So you see that playing out.
I do think that is part of the strategy, and I do also think it matches up both with Musk's business career, which is just work as fast as possible to make the biggest changes you can. You know, if you look at what he did at Tesla, if you look at what he did with SpaceX, takes these big risks. You know, SpaceX almost went bankrupt Tesla almost bankrupt, but you just push as fast and as hard as possible, take these big risks, and it's worked out for him. I think what we're seeing now is government is fundamentally different.
The capitalist system is set.
Up to reward these big risks for a Tesla, for a SpaceX, but people, I think have less of an appetite for a big risk with social security or the school system or all these other things that the government deals with. And that's really what we're sorting through right now.
If you are a lay person, if you're just a regular maybe even a fan of Elon Musk has watched him for years. He said, listen, everyone said it was chaos what he was doing at Twitter. Everyone said it was chaos what he was doing at Tesla, in SpaceX and all of these companies that he's touched. It has gone through this sort of painful period or continues to go through painful periods, and then came out the other side, enriching Elon Musks and his companies and leading to some positive endgame.
Right.
So, is there out of the cocoon emerging as a butterfly moment for the US government or does it just keep getting more chaotic.
I think you could imagine theoretically at working well. I think it's undeniably true that there is waste and fraud embedded in the federal government. In fact, the Inspectors Generals, which Trump got rid of shortly after getting into office, have uncovered a lot of that in their reports. They don't necessarily get rid of it, but they say, we've tracked this, and these payments are fraudulent. And you could imagine someone like Musk doing a good job of figuring out where those things are through technical knowledge or something like that. I think that the key differentiator between what must did at a Tesla or a SpaceX is he was working with people who knew about space exploration and knew about rockets and knew about cars, and he was adding his intensity to that process and risk taking, his appetite for risk taking to that process, and they came out with a good result, at least for a period of time.
I think DBD on both of those companies.
But here he's just taken the same people who know about space exploration and he's dropped them into the Social Security Department or the Department of Energy or the EPA, and in many cases he's not even putting in his experts. He's finding these very i'll say charitably early career software people who have shown I think little interest or even curiosity about how the government works, dropping them into these agencies and just sort of letting them run wild, also pairing it with sort of this kind of paranoid fantasy about what's happening in a lot of these places, and having that drive a lot of the activity. I think fundamentally, what we're seeing is much more destructive rather than something that has a lot of potential.
How is your opinion of Elon Musk changed during this Doge process?
I think fundamentally, I'm skeptical of anyone with power, so that's how I came into it. That's good when you're writing working as a journalist. But I do think that he is different than a businessman like Trump because he does have real accomplishments. Tesla did fundamentally change the electric car industry and mainstreamed a lot of electric cars. SpaceX did a lot of things making space exploration cheaper and more efficient, So these are real accomplishments. I think that what has surprised me, or at least to the extent that it's happened, is just how reckless he's willing to be in this new position, and how deeply ingrained this idea of power maximization Elon has in all of his activities. And I think that's where he and Trump really see eye to eye, is that they are both trying to maximize their power and they're willing to cross over the line. The way they figure out where the line is is by crossing over it and then seeing what happens.
So I think recklessness is actually not a part of it that surprises me at all. We've seen recklessness be kind of a recipe for transformation at all of his companies, at X, at Tesla, as we've talked about like getting rid of the unnecessary rules, at least in Elon Musk's mind, what rules are unnecessary for change to happen more quickly. What's surprising here to me is like, this is an Elon's money, this is our money, this is taxpayer money that's being appropriated by this one person. The usual process obviously go through Congress, Like that's just the part of it where you would expect to see some legal resistance, but it's been kind of piecemeal. We haven't seen like a broad fight back at all.
Why not.
There has been a good amount of legal resistance, just in the sense of a lot of lawsuits have been filed. But I think that fundamentally Trump has handed elon the keys to the whole government.
That was something I did not anticipate.
He's unilaterally making these cuts. What you've seen is some of these judges will issue a temporary restraining order, which is basically the quickest kind of order that they can issue, saying you can't implement this policy.
You can't just cut off all of the funding.
For nih for example, because you've decided you don't like DEI like, that's not something you can do. And then what you've seen the reaction to be is just make a little tweak or do something else like cut off every single government credit card to have the same impact as the first thing, and then it cycles back to court and then they issue a new temporary strating order and then another little change happens. So it's very difficult as long as Trump is willing to let him do what he wants in each of these agencies, for the legal system to keep up with it. So I think that is the dynamic that's at play, and also the other entity that could do something potentially is you could have Congress step in and sit and try to raise him in more and essentially empowered these judges more to make quicker decisions and create clearer legal lines about what is appropriate and what is inappropriate.
And that's not happening either.
I feel like that's such a huge challenges or reporters, like you're writing these things Doge is doing. This does is cutting off that and you of course need to include in the story the context that this is the law doesn't allow those to do this, but the structure of the government as it currently stands, and the way Trump has allowed Doge access, you know, it's kind of making it happen anyway. I find that to be a challenge in like writing about this, the certainty that we need to have about like, you know, what Trump says is happening, what's actually happening, and then whether legally it can happen, or whether they have the authority to do what they say they're doing. Even just Trump saying that he will label vandalism of Tesla's domestic terrorism, like is there going to be EO on that?
In Executive order.
Are we going to see a law change to that respect because Trump doesn't really.
Have the authority to declare that for maybe he does.
Here's something I also think that's going on as we go through this process. This is extraordinary process that I don't think we've ever seen before, is that the law is the law, but it's not self enforcing, and ultimately the courts are there.
Lawyer, I just want to I just want to let our listeners there, you are, you are, you have a lot of grade, go.
To law school.
Yeah, for better or for worse. But it's not self enforcing. And I think that the courts, especially their best position to constrain this. But if they issue an order, they are going to be extremely reluctant to come to the conclusion that the executive branch is violating their order because once they once they say that, what are they going to do? What is the recourse that they have? The whole system is premised on everyone respecting everyone's role, and when the court issues the order, the expectation is that's taken seriously and the executive branch follows it. They follow the purpose of the order, not just saying, oh yeah, we technically recognize this order and now we're going to do the same thing, just in a slightly different way, which is a lot of what we're seeing right now. So then that puts the Court in a really difficult position because they don't want to put a spotlight on the fact that they have not their authority is now being ignored because.
Where does that leave the court?
Right?
Where does that leave the whole system? So that's really the dance that's going on there.
And then we're seeing from Musk, from Vans, from a lot of the folks involved, like all of us, talk of court reform, judicial reform, How bad slash complicated could things get from here? In terms of this dance between the executive branch the legislature of the courts, I.
Would say it's already very bad. I think it's very bad.
And the authority of the courts, whether they want to admit it or not, is being eroded.
If you want to take a slightly more positive view.
When the one issue that has gotten all the way to the Supreme Court, we're likely to see several more make it there. The Court did end up and they may not do this next time. But for this particular instance involving USAID and funding that had been already approved. It was all the way over there and then cut off. They said, well, you do have to fund that, and a couple of the conservatives went over with the three liberals and formed the majority there. And it does appear that the Trump administration said we're going to listen to that and release that very limited amount of funding. So maybe that's a line that they will draw. But even so, it's not supposed to be that you only respect the Supreme Court. Most cases don't even get to the Supreme Court. They take a very small number of cases, and we're in a position where the authority of the courts is deeply in question.
And I hear from people every day at these ages. I've talked to more people who worked.
At the federal government between January twentieth today that I think I have in my whole career writing until then. And things are happening and I can't even write about them all. But things are happening every day that appear to violate these orders, and there's just very little that could be done. A lot of it isn't even getting out there.
I mean, even as a journalist, there's very little that you feel you can do given the amount of violation.
You're saying, yes exactly. When you go through these things, you can't just take one person's word for it. If someone's telling you something, you've got to then go to your other sources see if they can confirm that, or find somebody else who knows about that. So it's a whole process and you have to figure out what's significant. But the kinds of things that are happening, I would say there's really very little deference being.
Shown to the what consequences do you think there should realistically be for what's happening, this erosion of the court's authority, the getting a legal order and then kind of editing their approach but doing the same thing that the court's objected to. Where do we end up a few months years down the road.
I think that there are things that the courts could do. They could hold someone in contempt of court. They could hold a cabinet secretary or an assistant secretary in contempt of court for not following their orders. I don't think many judges are going to haul off Trump appointees to jail.
Like I just don't think they're in the business of doing that.
So I think that there's two directions. Either the Trump administration will push this to a certain line but then decide, well, if it gets to the Supreme Court, or maybe if it gets to the Appeals Court, we're going to follow those decisions. We'll just keep challenging them into one of these courts say so, or they just do whatever they would like to do and you have a complete breakdown of the constitutional system of government.
But I think that's I think that that is definitely on the table.
Complete breakdown of the constitution is on the table.
Okay, yeah, I'm not going to say that we're we're there, but that's the process. That's the dance that we're involved in now. Elon Musk is testing the limits, seeing how far he can go. And once that limit is clearly defined by the court and the dance is over, will they then say, Okay, we understand now where the limit is and back off, or will they just continue pushing ahead. And that's the thing that we'll find out over the next I don't know how long it's going to play out, six months, a year, two years, but that's what's playing out.
I even wonder how long Musk can afford to keep running this the way he's running it, it sounds like he's starting to have tension with Trump's cabinet. He's starting to have big consequences for his businesses. And in the beginning of this process, one of our big questions that we had was, is this whole relationship with Trump something that's going to enriched Musk and his companies or hurt them? Right the foundation of his wealth, everything he's built to this point. Does Tesla benefit from Trump selling cars on the White House lawn or is that a stain on their brand down the line. It's so interesting to see this push and pull not just between the executive branch and the other branches the government, but between Elon Musk and his legacy.
Is this his legacy? Is that his legacy?
And if you look at places like Germany where Tesla sales are down because following Musk's support of the fire right there, we could see people start to treat Musk's companies as extensions of the US government and vice versa, or use them to appeal to Trump. That's the other option is that he could be given a lot personally just because he is a representative of the US government.
Yeah, I mean, I think once you get to the point where you're selling cars at the White House, that's not a good sign. The value of Tesla and how must become the richest person in the world is not because people think that another car company, even a car company that only sells electric cars, is that valuable. It's based on the idea that this is just the beginning, and he's going to launch into this whole new world of autonomous vehicles and the robots, the humanoid robots that are going to be our company. Yeah, Butler's or whatever is going to happen next. That's where the value is. So but I think one thing that is the problem is that right now he doesn't sell any of those things, and it's a public company. So if your car sales are dropping, you know, seventy five percent in Germany and fifty percent in other places in Europe and forty percent in California and all these major drops, are you even going to get to the point where you can develop those autonomous vehicles and robots and things like that. I think that's a that's a big question market so far, I think it has not been nearly as beneficial as most people thought. Certainly the market gave him a big bump as soon as Trump got elected, and he went up and up, and then they were thinking they saw maybe this isn't working out as well. We are seeing some things where the ways in which Musk, and we've done quite a bit of a reporting on this, can leverage.
His position to help his businesses.
So you've seen Musk use the White House complex meet with the Prime Minister of India and then finally they get in and Starlink now has the means to operate in India. We've seen Musk push into the FAA with Starlink. We've seed Musk push to get the International Space Station decommissioned, maybe a year or two early, so that he can start using SpaceX to service the commercial space stations that will replace the International Space stations early and generate more revenue this way. So how does that balance out? You're selling less cars, maybe you're having more rocket launches and selling more Starlink terminals. I don't know, you that's definitely outside of my expertise.
I guess the big question is, like, is you just started an Elon Musk publication? Is his power growing from here? He's already the richest man in the world. He's already working hand in hand with Trump, if not managing a lot of what Trump does. Where do you see going? Where do you see Musk's power?
Is he peaking?
And where does the Musk Trump relationship go from here?
Well?
I think what you see as Musk has less of an ability to really drive the growth of his companies, at least in the short term. Where I see things going is he's doubling down on his political influence. So in addition to some spending seemingly all of his time in DC working on doge and indicating that he's going to do that for another year or more, he's also talking about putting another one hundred million dollars into Trump's political operation. You see him putting money into Supreme Court races in Wisconsin. So I think really doubling down and seeing how far he can take his political influence as a way to maybe hedge against some of these economic issues with his companies.
So how long do you think that this Trump friendship is going to last? And how will it end if at all?
Yeah, I know a lot of people are predicting a blow up. My theory about why this is not happening is there's one thing that Trump values the most and I think must value the most, and that's money. And if you look at Trump's multi decade career, mostly in real estate, he has made more money just by connecting up with Musk and the crypto bros that surround him, starting his meme coin, starting these relationships with World Liberty Financial and other crypto ventures. Then he has his entire career. He's always said that he.
Was a billionaire.
He's now a billionaire, and I think he knows that it's going to be Elon. That also hooks him up with the next idea to make his next billion dollars and I don't see him kicking Elon out because of that. I see this being a sustained, mutually beneficial relationship.
There we go, jud I've learned a lot.
I want to ask, how long do you see yourself running a Musk watch in addition to popular information? And if it goes global? If Musk goes global with this technique, will you go global as well?
I see myself continuing this and definitely when I was trying to hire people to work with me, because I do idea they'll hire at least one or two more people to get this going. A lot of people thought, oh, this is just going to fizzle out. So I think I was right about that that it didn't, like immediately.
Feel very validated, didn't, you know, fizzle out immediately.
But I don't see this going away, you know. I think he has now, along with Trump, is the embodiment of the Republican Party. And I think it's just I don't really see a scenario in which this is very quickly unwound and all of a sudden there's some sort of new version of the Republican Party that doesn't involve a Musk. And his approach to this, I think they've all bought in. And yeah, you see his ambitions. His ambitions are well beyond the United States. He's in Germany, he's in India, He's all over the place wanted even more power.
And I think it just shows that's.
You don't become the world's wealthiest person by being satisfied and saying, oh I have enough. I see for the indefinite future him continuing to push more for more and more power. And if one risk doesn't work out, then I think his solution is usually to take a bigger risk.
There you have it.
Thank you so much, Jed really appreciate all your time with us today and.
I'll keep reading.
Thanks a lot, thanks for having me.
This episode was produced by Magnus Henrikson. Anna Maserakas is our editor, and rayhan Hamanci, our senior editor. Angel Roscillo helped with the recording.
The Elon Inc.
Theme is written and performed by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiora. Brendan Francis Newnam is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. A big thanks to our supporters Joel Weber and Brad Stone. I'm Sarah Fryar. If you have a minute, rate and review our show, it'll help other listeners
Find us and see you next week.
